Sunday, September 11, 2016

I have been working on the GPS-AHRS hotshoe for a while. The initial complete prototype was built around the Xadow platform. It is one of those continuous iteration projects, I wish someone puts me out of misery and brings out a COTS solution that is affordable soon.

I put the idea for the GPS-AHRS on the Hexiwear platform and received a free Hexiwear dev kit to built it with, a great deal. The Hexiwear has lots of toolchains for building projects with, including the Kinetis Design Studio from NXP and ARM MBed. This makes development on this platform a breeze. It also comes with a lot of sensors : barometer, gyro, accelerometer and magnetometer are all included. It has built in BLE for communications and a 16bit OLED screen. The only missing links are GPS, Nikon camera interface and a sensor fusion algorithm to obtain Euler angles/quarternions from raw motion data.

I already have working MBed code for sensor fusion and I have successfully tested reading all the motion sensors over I2C, so this should be easy to put together in the next few days.

I also compiled the stock firmware in KDS and did some small changes to show the Magnetometer data as part of the UI. This was relatively simple simply involved attaching a listener to one of the messages already being broadcast in the RTOS and a hacked up page to display the results. The results of this code can be seen below.